A new television series, ‘My year with the tribe’, has already received mixed reviews for twenty-first century voyeurism and the staunch way in which our hero, Will Millard, pushes on with his plans to film an ‘untouched’ tribe, despite early indications that the activities of previous television teams and wealthy tourists now direct the authentic life-styles of his targets. The series, which airs on a Sunday evening on BBC Two, is set in the Indonesian province of Papua and concerns the Korowai people.

My own disappointment came early on when Millard commented that he saw the Korowai as: ‘our link to our own pasts, you know, back when we were all living in the forest’. I thought that we had abandoned that type of simplistic Darwinian viewpoint years ago. It is wrong for all sorts of reasons. The Korowai are not a link to our past:

1. They live in the twenty-first century;
2. They live in Indonesia.

Never mind the fact that you are talking deep prehistory if you want to go back to a time when we lived in any sort of rainforest resembling the homelands of Papua. To talk as if the Korowai are some sort of throwback, ignores thousands of years of development. Whatever their lifestyles, communities today have all benefitted from millennia of experience. Geographical and cultural dissonance do not equate to time travel. Evolution, as set out in the nineteenth century, was a significant theoretical advance in the way we thought about the world, but it has been developed and modified since Darwin first proposed it. It is no longer regarded as a straightforward path from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’, ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’. Life is more complicated, twenty-first century life, infinitely more so. The Korowai occupy an environment that is worlds away from that of western Europe, at any time. Their lifestyle has evolved to fill it. To suggest that they represent some sort of evolutionary standstill is to belittle them.

Nevertheless, I think I am going to like this series, though for all the wrong reasons. In many ways I am amazed that the BBC still condone such apparently naive, poorly prepared filmaking. There is a horrible fascination to watching it. In an ironic twist to Millard’s colonial introduction, we quickly find that the Korowai have, indeed, adapted perfectly to fit the twenty-first century. So much so, in fact, that they enter into convincing discussions of the treehouse dwellings and lack of modern clothing that he wishes to film. Plans are made, the TV crew are excited and set off through the rainforest with their local guides. What we don’t, at first, see are the local fixers returning home to round up family members and don their penis gourds before setting out to occupy the show homes, high in the canopy, which they now reserve for the entertainment of rich foreign visitors. It is all a performance.

I’m not sure whether I am sad, or just resigned, to find that in the ultimate extension of the capitalist dream, the Korowai have monetarised their traditional activities. Given a willing market, why shouldn’t they. Though I do detect a serious element of exploitation as western tourists pay miniscule amounts of money to view traditional undertakings. It is a familiar dilemma: sadness at the loss of cultural staples measured against happiness that people have been able to take on at least some of the trappings of a more comfortable life. I remember an architectural historian bemoaning the picturesque ruined crofts that litter the Orkney countryside and comparing them unfavourably with modern box-houses, only to be told in no uncertain terms that Orcadians preferred homes that were easier and cheaper to heat and clean and where nooks and crannies for cobwebs and dust were minimised.

Of course, in this case, the modern Korowai village does not have all the comforts to which we are accustomed, so I am left with a feeling of unease. But I will continue to watch. I’m looking forward to seeing just who is leading who. It is quite fun to watch an archetypical television presenter finding out that he is not quite so much in control as he thought he was. Having said that, there are hints that the final episode may portray Millard’s subjects losing patience at his relentless invasion of their privacy. Given his desire to arrive unannounced and without a full grasp of their language or culture, one wonders whether they really understood the implications of his plans. The series may not tell us anything about archaeology, and not much about the lifestyle of either party, but it is a great lesson in the diversity of twenty-first century thought processes.

Humans, as I read recently, look for patterns, even meanings, in things. Archaeologists are used to dealing with things and we certainly like pattern. Half (a generalization) of our data is derived from material culture, the ‘things’ of the past; we deal with the everyday, and other, objects with which people were once familiar and which have survived to the present day. We construct our narratives about the past from the interpretation of these objects. In order to do that, we look for the patterns and we try to explain them. Some of the patterns are obvious: a row of round bottomed pots; a collection of leaf shaped arrowheads, we assume that groups of similar objects relate to a common template incorporating certain desires and functions. Other patterns can be more problematic: the different shapes of certain stone tools can, for example, seem to blend into one another; one shape of pot can, apparently, be replaced by another. All too often, we find ourselves requiring an explanation for the differences, rather than the similarities, in the material that we excavate.

Thus, we have long struggled to explain the meaning of the different types of material culture that we encounter and of the changes in material culture that we perceive. Essentially, much archaeology continues to use the foundations set by Gordon Childe in 1925 (drawing on the theories of, among others, a prominent German archaeologist, Gustav Kossinna), who considered that different suites of material culture could be used to identify different groups with different social commonalities. These groups were generally equated with human communities (known as ‘cultures’) – with the people of the past and the particular traits of behaviour and belief that identified them as separate from their neighbours. Thus, certain types of decorated pottery might define a particular ‘Culture’, let us call it the Round Bottomed Culture, which might, over time, evolve into another Culture with different pots, let us call this one the Square Bottomed Culture.

Childe was working without the benefit of radiocarbon analysis, and the rest of the suite of scientific techniques on which we rely today. He looked for patterns across the different types of archaeological evidence he had to hand, and the general assumption was made that as one element of material culture changed, so other elements would change too. This, it seemed, backed up the idea that social culture was reflected in material culture. Today, the system is cracking, and yet we still seem keen to fit the data into his paradigms.

It is not difficult to identify patterns of material culture, but we struggle with their explanation, and even more with the identification and explanation of the moments of change between them. It seems that it is hard to get away from the idea that when one element changes so should everything else. It is also hard to get away from the idea that material culture equals community. As we refine the evidence with which we work, so it becomes obvious that multiple elements of material culture rarely change together, yet few studies have tried to go back to basics and quantify the chronologies of change. It is, it seems, easier to live with the flawed but familiar understandings of the past. This has led to some big questions and discrepancies that we seem reluctant to challenge.

In the UK, our hunter-gatherer ancestors of the immediate post-glacial period, for example, used tiny stone tools that we call microliths. Microliths come in two basic ranges: Broad Blade Microliths and Narrow Blade Microliths. Many years ago, Roger Jacobi published a seminal work suggesting that the broad blade microliths were earlier and defined those communities able to maintain contact with Continental Europe while narrow blade microliths had developed later and were characteristic of subsequent communities developing within the more isolated environment of mainland Britain. Jacobi’s work has undoubtedly helped us to make sense of the Mesolithic communities of the British Isles but there are two problems with his explanation. Firstly, the assumption that a one-size-fits-all explanation will hold good for the whole of the UK: in actual fact, in the north of these islands the chronological precedence of broad blade microliths is still in question. Secondly, the assumption that microlith type equals community: it might, but then again it might not, and we have not really examined the alternatives.

Moving forward in time, the development of a highly decorated, flat bottomed, style of pottery in Neolithic Britain was at first considered to herald a new society: Piggott identified it as the ‘Rinyo-Clacton Culture’ in 1954. Today, we would be more circumspect in our interpretations: recent research has focussed on the possibilities of increasing complexity and sophistication developing within existing communities (Richards and Jones in their recent book); or the idea that it might form part of a package of goods associated with a complex belief system that spread across Britain to overlie existing society (as suggested in recent popular works). Or both!

We still find it hard to move away from the ingrained wisdom of archaeological greats such as Childe. But surely, the time is ripe to go back to basics and re consider some of those basic foundations on which our archaeological understanding rests. We have the tools to provide more sophisticated studies of material culture. We have the tools to examine whether apparently coincident change really occurs and, indeed, to look for other correlations for example between elements of material culture change and environmental dissonance.

Past archaeologists were seeking to explain the patterns, it seems to me that it is the explanation of change that forms the pressing question for our times.

I’m watching events relating to Britain’s position in Europe with a kind of horrible fascination. Chronologically, my work concerns the period when the land that would become the UK was merely a mountainous, largely ice-girt, peninsula on the north west of the continent that we call ‘Europe’. I realise that this has biased my point of view.

This was the time of Doggerland. The communities who lived here were highly mobile and likely to have known an extensive and varied terrain that ranged across several of the units we now call independent countries. It is likely that many communities did not live in the Scottish area permanently. Of course, they were not subject to the pressures of people and resources in the same way that we are today. But pressure is relative and I have a gut feeling that they may have felt that the uncertainties that they did experience – such as the availability of enough food, poor weather, worries over increasing populations, or the advent of newcomers – were, in fact, just as much of a threat to their wellbeing.

Over time, as we know, the land mass did actually diminish and population expand. This must have been an issue for the worriers of the time. In their 2013 paper Fraser Sturt and colleagues estimate that the Dover Straits were breached between 8000 and 7500 BP and that within 500 years of this the last traces of Doggerland had disappeared. From this point onwards Britain was an island and the island mentality could start to develop. Contact with those on the continental landmass did not cease, but the development of insular ways of doing things and insular beliefs was, perhaps, inevitable.

And yet.

At no time during the long history of island Britain have we ceased to absorb newcomers. Of course, it is human nature to fear change and the possibilities of instability that it brings. You only have to read the wealth of literature (both old and new) that takes culture clash as a driving theme to realise just how much established communities would prefer to live in the status quo. It is also notable, however, just how much the introduction of new ways has enriched our society down the millennia. So much so, in fact, that we have seemingly forgotten the foreign origins of some of the aspects of life that are today regarded as quintessentially British. Wikipedia informs me that the first known English record of tea occurs in a letter written in 1615 by one Richard Wickham, who ran an East India Company office in Japan.

I’m not sure what we’d be left with if we stripped out all non-indigenous aspects of our lives today – the first people in Britain after the Ice Age were, after all, incomers.

OK, I know my views are naïve. I know that the debate today is about global economics and mass movement of peoples. But I’m more of an optimist than some. I still believe, or believed, that we could find solutions to the apparent problems we thought we faced. For now, I mourn the loss (temporary I hope), of the easy diversity we embraced. I enjoyed the advent of new foods into my local supermarket. I envied the opportunities for study abroad and the experience of new cultures that our young folk could take advantage of. I was happy to benefit from EU research grants and the funding that assisted local areas. And I welcomed the opportunity to meet people from different places, whether they were sorting my plumbing, sharing a shopping queue, or sitting in the cinema. I’m reassured that the powers-that-be assure me we will get it all back with new and better deals. I have to believe in them.  I admit to occasional late night skepticism, and I’m depressed by the thought that it will involve the work (and cost) of thousands of bureaucrats over several years. Was it really worth unpicking?

For now, I can escape to the world of work, to a time when Britain, truly, physically, was a part of Europe. When to be European was not just a mind-set, but rather an intrinsic part of our being. Perhaps I’m just a Doggerland-o-phile.

First of all there is the depiction of two competing groups living in a single landscape. How do you tell people apart? How do they use the landscape? How do different languages and religions work? How do groups view one another? Secondly there is the depiction of the Christian church struggling to establish and maintain its place within Saxon society. This raises all sorts of questions relating to new influences and new ways: the role of women; education; medicine; food; religion and politics; and religion and language – all of these come into the story. Thirdly, there is the sheer level of violence in the world: how did one maintain economic stability when passing horsemen might burn your farmstead and kill your folks on a frequent basis; how does it affect people to live in a world where extreme violence is commonplace?

Obviously, this is a period about which I know very little – certainly not enough to pronounce on the accuracy of the depiction. But for me the interest lies not so much in the details as in the questions. You could regard it as science fiction, although the details are subtler than in Star Wars many of the questions are the same. It has got me thinking. For me it is a reminder that the stability and unity that we seek so urgently today have always been elusive. It turns my mind to the end of Mesolithic Britain, another great time of clashing cultures. What was it like to live then? Was it violent as some people suggest? There have been so many periods when the landscape of Britain was home to differing and distinctive peoples. Are we unique today in seeking a cosy homeland where all agree?

Finally, I do return to the detail. How on earth did the programme makers manage to find an actor who looked so like the Alfred Jewell?

This week I went to a great lecture in Aberdeen which got me thinking about this. Robin Torrence and Jude Philp (from the Australian Museum and the Macleay Museum, respectively) were talking about their work researching the ethnographic collections of Sir William MacGregor, the first Administrator of British New Guinea in the late nineteenth century. Much of MacGregor’s material ended up in Aberdeen when he retired home. The interesting thing is how the material changed from first contacts to once the relationships had been established. Apparently when the British first came into contact with a new tribe the material they were given comprised mainly objects that reflected the uncertain nature of the contact, and the people they first met, like clubs and mace heads. Later on, when everyone had got the measure of each other, the material changed to more domestic items. So you can see a difference in the collections from different areas over time. Also it seems that here, at least, excavation of the mission settlements and the local settlements suggests that each had very few of the others’ artefacts. I’m wondering what it says about culture contact and material object and particularly to our archaeological evidence for the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in the UK. We need to be very careful of erroneously drawing direct analogies from ethnographic work, and in the UK it is likely that this period of transition saw many different scenarios. But it is obvious that we need to think outside the box a bit.

Sir William MacGregor (source: University of Aberdeen website)

MacGregor was very aware that the advent of colonial rule would change the way of life of the people he was living among and he was keen that the material he had collected be used for the education of people at home. I’m hoping that he would have been pleased to know that it is still provoking debate over 100 years later.